Medieval Midwifery, Medicine, Magic

The words of women seeking safety and strength for their reproductive lives speak across time. These childbirth charms first came to me by way of a book I read over twenty years ago, Women and Writing in Medieval Europe. Amid the excerpts from queens, nuns, and advice for wives, there is a short chapter called “Old English pregnancy charms” in the Motherhood and Work section. All five charms begin with the phrase, “The woman who cannot bring her child to maturity” or a slight variation; the Old English word is afedan. The phrase “cannot bring her child to maturity” encompasses many outcomes on the spectrum of motherhood: miscarriage, abortion, stillbirth, infant death, or child death. The medieval woman who performed the rituals in these instructions would be seeking help for herself in what was likely the most dangerous time of her life.

The charms are to protect and strengthen a woman before, during, and after her pregnancy. First are instructions for stepping over the grave of a dead man; secondly to step over her lord: both of these assert her strength. Thirdly she is to go to the church and declare her child’s safe birth before the altar. The fourth charm is for the release of retained grief over the loss of a previous child. The fifth charm is to help the mother successfully produce milk, involving a “cow of one color,” a running stream, spitting and not looking around while going through the actions.

I bookmarked the page with the idea that one day I’d like to work with these spells. Here were some really interesting “old wives tales.” My interest in women’s reproductive lives is personal, familial, political and deep. In these fragments of spells from an old Anglo-Saxon herbal I felt a connection to women who lived in another age but had the same biology as me.

This year I realized that in the time since I first discovered these texts in a printed book, many old manuscripts have been uploaded to the internet. A quick trip over to the British Library’s Digitised Manuscript website soon yielded the exact manuscript from the late 10th-early 11th century. This set of charms is from the Lacnunga, meaning “Remedies” and is found in MS Harley 585, f. 185 r,v. The Lacnunga and Bald’s Leechbook comprise the primary sources of the earliest recorded Anglo-Saxon medicine. It was here I found the wonderful drawings that help tell the story.

The snake appears again and again throughout many of the charms, for conditions as varied as a toothache, fever, elf-shot, or to staunch bleeding. I wanted to use the image of this ancient animal of earth, one rich with shamanic as well as biblical associations, somewhere in these charms.

The instructions for the woman to step over her lord seemed the best place. With this ritual Eve’s daughter takes back her rightful power and enters the painful process of childbirth as strong as she can be, even stronger than her husband, in this.

The pregnant belly marginalia appears in the first pages of the herbal called the Pseudo-Apuleius for its similarity to the classical herbal. This drawing helps make clear the purpose and likely source of these charms. Being able to see the original writing in the oldest English language gave me new insight about the translation I was using, which was written by Dr. G. Storms in Anglo-Saxon Magic, published in 1948. In his description, he refers to the practitioner of these remedies rather disparagingly as a “medicine-man” due to their magical nature. This is to differentiate the role from the Leechbook‘s “medical man” who used the “superior” method of bleeding his patients with leeches. I am so conditioned to the male academic voice that it took me a while to realize these would be instructions from a midwife to another woman. Men have only been involved in the care of pregnant women and birthing babies for a relatively short period of time, historically speaking. Very likely these pages were written by a male monastic in a scriptorium. Just as likely the source was a female midwife, and the charms very old.

I printed off the two manuscript pages from the Library’s images, and went through the Old English letter by letter, writing the modern letter above, until I was able to separate out each individual charm. I decided not to use the broad pen writing of the original manuscript for the charms I was writing, except in a palimpsest I made for one charm. On the right, above, is a homework page on which I first wrote these charms ten years ago when I devised this script for a conference class. I have written about my goddess glyphs extensively elsewhere; using them for this text felt right, for the roots of Anglo-Saxon are German and the glyphs are quite similar to runes, with the addition of curved lines.

In the third charm, it was clear in the Old English that the word was cwic, (the last four letters in the second line above, showing the Old English letter “wynn” for the “w” sound; you can also see how idiosyncratic the word spacing was). I expect that cwic is the ancestor of our word “quicken.” This word is still used by women to describe the first time they feel the child move inside them, and to me is preferable to the more ponderous “when the mother feels the child is alive” of the translation I was using.

I began by changing that line, and then imagined what the other lines might have been before the christian overlay. For this I made some calfskin vellum into a palimpsest, by writing on it, then scraping and sanding it. The time when these charms were written down was a period of transition from the old religion to the new one. A woman might have gone into a church and declared that the child would be safely born, by christ (the word appears with the small c in the manuscript, second from bottom line, next to last word, spelled criste, with a small c, long s and short t). Or, she might have followed the old religion which is referenced in many charms of the same period, in which modor in eorth is invoked (modor, or “mother” also appears as the first word in the second line of the manuscript detail above). Invocations to Erce also appear in this era, which is likely the name for the Earth Goddess. So I imagined that in the old religion, she might go, not to a church, but to a grove, where there would also be an altar, and declare by Mother Earth that the child would be born.

I wanted to make these books true to the spirit of the time and the materials a working midwife might have access to. Thus most of the vellum pieces are the oddly-shaped offcuts created when the skin is cut to the square and the irregular bits are discarded. A goose quill would be easy to acquire, and limp leather bits salvaged from clothing could be made into the wrappers. I found my leather bits at a local powwow, a good place to find animal products used in handmade goods, and stitched the vellum into the wrappers with a linen thread coated with beeswax for ease of sewing and durability.

I added some gilded symbols to each charm, as an aid to remember the written instruction, but it was a stretch to imagine how a medieval midwife might have obtained these. Perhaps she was a cook or laundress in an abbey and had access to the skins and inks, so possibly this extra service of gilding might have been had by offering healing or sex. I made separate amulets for each instruction, as the actions described are quite distinct and would be performed separately. To number them in the order they are written down, I knotted the binding thread of each with its number in the sequence.

Recent attacks on women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies give these spells an eerie relevance. After I finished making these, emerging rather dazedly from a frenzy of archaic language and imagining the life of a medieval midwife, I found myself wondering what they might mean to modern life. As I was photographing them at the end of June, I was simultaneously watching the now-famous filibuster by state senator Wendy Davis in the Texas legislature, as she and her supporters stood their ground against the erosion of women’s health care. It was not lost on me that the intention behind both sets of words was the empowerment of women as they face the most difficult and deep decisions of their lives. The journey through pregnancy, whatever the outcome, is never trivial, never easy, and never the business of anyone except the woman, and whoever she has chosen to help her.

Beautiful process, and a unique project. Everything about this is powerful beyond words… there is something so timeless about these womanly desires for a healthy body, a safe pregnancy and an easy childbirth, intertwined with the charms, symbols and prayers to the Earth Mother. I love how a modern-day filibuster found its way into the story as well.

I really enjoyed reading this, both the details of your work and the thoughts/ideas that inspired it and were incorporated into it. (I’ve sent a link to this post to a friend of mine, a special collections/rare books librarian who’s very interested in this topic.)

Michele, thanks for the recommendation of A Midwife’s Tale. May be a good followup to this work. I am especially interested in those lost stories, for they can cast light on today in new ways. Why journals can be so very valuable! Luckily my library has this book; I’ve made a note to check it out when I have time to dive into these waters again.

This is a really amazing project. Well done.
I am a midwife turned graduate student in the history department at UCLA. My research is in the history of childbirth, midwifery, obstetrics. The History of Medicine librarian here collects art books related to medical topics. You should contact him to see if he would be interested in purchasing one of these.

Diana, this is a very good question, which sent me on a search for the best text to share for this work. I generally do like to share the plain text versions of my calligraphy and book work. Translations of something written around 1000 or 1100 also must be understood through multiples lenses, beginning with the transcriber of traditions that might have been described differently by someone of the old religion.

The best I can do to show you the plain text of the charms is to send you to this link, which I arrived at by searching for “G. Storms Anglo-Saxon Old English Pregnancy Charms”, and should take you to page 93 of Women and Writing in Medieval Europe: A Sourcebook , which I cited in the post above and is readily available.

The book it came from, Anglo-Saxon Magic, by G. Storms and published in 1948, is out of print but can be found sometimes.

A more recent book called Anglo-Saxon Medicine by Malcolm Laurence Cameron, 1993, has a slightly different translation which can also be seen here.

The most recent treatment of these old charms seems to be in Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine by Anne Van Arsdall, a medieval scholar, published in 2002. The tantalizing chapter in this book is entitled “Manuscripts, Illustrations, and the Need for a New Translation”, and can be found in part at this link. (Don’t be confused by the German page: for some reason this page showed a little more of the chapter than the one in English, and of course the pages are all scanned from the English language book.)

The first translation of these manuscripts was by O. Cockayne, 1864-1866 in Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England. Though Van Arsdall credits the original translation for the care Cockayne took with the exact reproduction of the manuscript’s letters and the creation of an Anglo-Saxon font, she also challenges the gender biases in the Victorian attitude. “The reader . . . is easily misled about (1) the intended use for the herbal – the remedies appear to be only for men, (2) about the seeming absence of complaints specific to women – Cockayne disguised some of them in Latin or Greek . . . . instead of straightforward English when he encountered a remedy dealing with female functions . . . a reader might be left with the impression that the Anglo-Saxons did not deal in a straightforward manner with ‘delicate subjects, when they did.” (Van Arsdall, pp. 108-109). Her more modern viewpoint is informed by the newer scholarship pursued by women, who obviously have a different view than a mid-Victorian man, for as she points out “Language style very much affects how information is received”. An interesting review of this book is at this Clerestories’ post. The actual new translations provided by Van Arsdall are not shown in the pages viewable on the internet.

So as you can see from these many citations, a “plain text” version can be one of several versions!

Thank you for writing this! Just one concern. It’s very unlikely that midwives were literate, and thus unable to read the medical book you point out above (the Ps.-Apuleius Herbal). It probably was a “medicine man” (whatever that meant) who read the manuscript, prepared the medicines, and treated the pregnant woman’s body. Just something to think about.

I wonder if you read the post before you replied. This project was a re-imagining of the male-centric view of “his-tory.” I am well aware of the role of medieval monasteries in preserving knowledge, so do not doubt that a male scribe may have written the original manuscript. But I still maintain that the source of this knowledge was those who lived it. Women attended women during their pregnancies and during childbirth, and in every other time of reproductive life. Until quite recently, given the long view, men had little to do with the process aside from adding their seed to the mix.

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